While it is early in poll and voting analyses to draw any final conclusions, one overlooks the importance of staying on message down the home stretch at their own peril. This obviously includes making the right priorities in determining how the short time allotted to candidates in campaign rallies (and the television coverage of those speeches) is spent–in short, which messages should be stressed. I would argue that Hillary contributed mightily to her own demise based on some of the data that has been revealed even this early, as well as my own observations–made now and in the past. Sure, FBI Director Comey’s meddling in the election where and when he shouldn’t have no doubt played a big part in the outcome, as did latent racism among the large cohort of white, low educated, men and women. (More on the latter gender-group’s voting patterns in a moment). Those were known going into the final ten or so days, and despite those influences, a solid victory was still in reach by...

When Bernie Sanders famously said: “Enough of those damned emails,” many thought they’d heard the death-knell of that wearisome argument. Just this week, President Obama referred to it as “all that noise,” designed to confuse new voters about Hillary’s trustworthiness. The concept of “noise” comes from cybernetics and it refers to anything that interferes with a message sent by one party to another–we laymen also know it as static. Sad to say, we are all familiar with static on our cell phones which keep us from hearing the other person’s words and messages. The static in this case, as we all know by now, are the dark references to some of Hillary’s emails. Of the emails, President Obama also noted that while Clinton, while serving as his Secretary of State, made an “honest mistake” by using a private email server, as it was now “being blown up into just some crazy thing,” which will affect new voters when they hear “all that noise.” Why now, you may ask, all of this focused static. Well,...

After having become the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the latest polls show that Donald Trump has received a bump in the polls, and is nearly tied with Hillary Clinton. Since Hillary held a large, if not commanding, lead over Trump just a couple of weeks ago, this has many Clinton supporters in near panic. What does this recent surge by Donald really mean? For one thing upon becoming either party’s standard-bearer, candidates usually receive a bump in the polls. The same thing happens following the party conventions in the summer. These latter poll jumps are most often short-lived as one party convention is followed in short order by the other’s. However, understanding the bump that the winning candidate gets in the polls upon becoming a party’s presumptive nominee is a bit more complicated, since there is often a significant period when the primary races are over between parties. Let’s take look at the mechanics of this kind of poll bump. During the primary campaign, a significant number of supporters of the...

Hillary won big in Mississippi, which continued her sweep of the southern states. This only reinforced what we already knew–that in states with large numbers of African-American voters on the Democratic rolls, she has it all over Bernie. Not that Bernie isn’t sympathetic to the problems facing African-Americans. It’s just that the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, have a long and steady history of working for that demographic’s issues, while Sanders, even with a civil rights foray during his youth, has not given the priority to Black issues. This can be explained away, or at least attempted to, because most of Sanders’ political life has been spent serving the interests of lily-white Vermont. His supporters will say that his focus on class conflict, and the plight of labor, automatically includes the interests of Black workers. For many, I suspect, this kind of explanation will resonate about as much as Hillary’s support for the Import-Export Bank as a means to bring jobs to Michigan did. Which is to say, not very much at all,...

Without an early debate, or a perceived competitive contest, there has been less media attention, and fewer national polls of the Democratic race. Most of the major pollsters were two to three weeks outdated on the Democratic side by the time the media were focusing on the effects of some outrageous “Donaldisms” on the Republican electorate. Those older polls showed Hillary with a commanding lead over Bernie Sanders, and beating all of the Republican contenders handily–with her early numbers when matched against Donald Trump among her highest. Conversely, Bernie Sanders, with low name-recognition was shown doing much poorer in those match-ups against the Republican hopefuls than Hillary…Though I agree with him on many issues, I can’t imagine Bernie Sanders’ status as a Socialist allowing him to win the general election for president. America just isn’t ready for that. It would be a George McG0vern-Richard Nixon race all over again.